Meriam Bousselmi of Tunisia is always fascinating to talk to as she has such a lovely, ingrained philosophical sensibility - and I found myself quoting what she said in this interview at Safe Havens 2018 in Sweden last December frequently over subsequent months. I also like the way she switches between languages when one appears insufficient, though for the reader that requires a little translation,
Michael: Meriam, you occupy a bit of an unusual space in that you are both a lawyer and a theatre director so you occupy the intersection of the spaces we have been talking about. Talk a little bit about how that evolved, how did you straddle both worlds which are often seen as being quite antagonistic or different worlds.
Meriam: I think first since I was a child my ambition was to write books so I really fell into books and I had this ability to be sensitive to the words and the movement of words and I can’t say why I chose that but it was my destiny in a way. But at the same time I had this strong feeling for justice and injustice and I wanted to become the president of the [Tunisian] republic, to change the world and to make myself more famous – which is not working now. And it was the orientation when I got my baccalaureate to choose to orient myself to enrol in a political science and legal university but before I was at university, I started already my career as a writer and play director in the amateur field but then I was in the professional field because I produced some texts, some books and some plays and I stated also to be in international workshops, atelier, projects. So it was both in parallel because I also got for five years training as a dramaturge and mise en scène in the Centre de Arabo-Africaine de Formation et Recherche in Hamra in Tunisia and I had my career as a lawyer. I wanted first to make my political career, so first year of political science I wanted to build my political party so I went to all the parties to see what are the strategies. And then I failed because I realised politics is about compromise and diplomacy, and I am a radical and I could not get what I want in a very direct way, so I said I will seek this through my art and through my work as an independent, and how can I build these inbetween spaces. Actually, I was very interested in these inbetween spaces; sometimes it can be very difficult with both careers as a lawyer and as an artist, they are freelance careers, lifetime jobs, not just office jobs. But I am working in these in-betweens and I have this ability to make the bridge and to try to be a facilitator in both sides. But we also need more creativity in our work; I think we are really missing (there are good project managers, project leaders, administrators) but there are not a lot of creatives, there are not a lot of people having a vision, the possibility to look at things from another perspective, to challenge the structures.
Michael: So you see yourself as a connector, connecting these disparate blocks and trying to build something?
Meriam: Yes, I have this ability because I have training from both sides to fly or to move freely between both sides, but also to create that which is inbetween. Like for example now I am working in research and I am talking about the staging of injustice , so I see how the concept of justice is not just a state institution, justice is a value and we have legal constructions of justice all over the world but justice is also part of the fictional construction of artists and writers and philosophers – and how both these words are communicating, how we’ve moved from a value of fictional construction, from an artistic construction, a creative construction to the state and visa-versa. So to explore what is inbetween and to explore the potential of this inbetweenness because people tend to be organised in entities and not explore what is inbetween because it is unknown. So I like to be in this un errant – it’s a kind of wandering – but I think it’s a very interesting wandering because it’s challenging to me but it’s also inspiring to others, also because I bring different performative languages in both sides. When I am with lawyers, they say “yes, the artist!” and when I am with the artists they see me as the lawyer [laughs]. So this inbetweenness is really je voi sais qua commune rechesse [I know you]; I see this as something rich and something I need to explore with more time and more tools to do my work.
Michael: You certainly have seen this rise from within progressive academia of the need for a multidisciplinary approach – but we’re up against a reactionary mood globally that is about compartmentalising, trying to roll back this notion of the interconnectivity of disciplines into discrete compartments that can be better managed I guess by this rightist and populist demagoguery. So navigating those inbetween spaces, those grey areas, in an environment in which there is this drive to make everything black-and-white…
Meriam: Exactly, this binary narrative or binary approach of the world, I think this is a classical way of knowledge, a classical way of education and a classical way of reflecting the matters of the world in terms of le science dures, le science molles [hard science, soft science]. I think today we need another kind of knowledge, another kind of education, another kind of reflecting the world because with the new media and internet and all this facility today to get information, before if you want to learn something, you have to look for the books, you had to travel, information was not accessible to everyone; today you are at your home and you can connect to several bibliothèques [libraries] in the world, you can connect to several articles, you know what is going on, then you have this, le savoir, the knowledge is not anymore that you are specialised in philosophy or you are specialised only in chimie [chemistry]. If we go back to the Greeks, the philosophers were also the scientists, the birth of science, the birth of knowledge was wide…
Michael: So we went from a situation where knowledge was always a polymath thing, a multiverse, and now we are coming back?
Meriam: Overspecialisation. And now we are coming back. We don’t have another solution because the complexity of the world needs a perspective where you can have different levels of analysing what is going on, a situation or a fact or a change in society. We cannot for example look at what is going on today with the rise of right-wing or popularism or liberal democracy without having notions of what is happening on the economic side, what is happening with the cultural side, what is happening with group psychology: you have to look at it with different eyes and to have this scientific knowledge, you have to look widely, you have to look at the inbetweenness, the intersections, in order to understand. It’s also a very speedy change; we don’t have the time to recognise how our societies are changing.
Michael: There are uncomfortable inbetween spaces as well, particularly for those who are stateless or undocumented migrants, that sort of thing. How do you navigate those spaces – because you actually want some sort of solidity, you want some document, you want a home of sorts?
Meriam: I am in a search, and I am observing and I am trying to make an interpretation of what are the changes, to be more reflective of what the changes are and what is behind this changing and where this changing is leading. And I think the main important question today we are neglecting, a lot of artists as well, and this is where I am not happy, is that we are driven all the time to react to the immediate questions, to be more [engaged] in comments like journalists and not visionary, not having the time to think of what will remain, what is the next, what is the alternative? It’s not enough to be critical because it doesn’t add a simple scratch to the system; it’s good…
Michael: But you need to build an alternative.
Meriam: Exactly. And for that you need time, and you need distance, and you need other tools, and you cannot be immediate. Today if you are an artist you are invited to talk about the release of your new book, you have one hour, we will ask you for fifty minutes about your idea about what is going on with the right wing, what do you think about the situation in Yemen, what do you think about the situation about immigration, did you hear about the new robot who feels more human, and what is your fear about the future – so everything, and then ten minutes about your book! So you have to be the expert of everything and nothing, so you have to collect information and some words work better so you have this performative language as well to give a proximative answer and to give this idea that you know everything. No-one dares to say “I don’t know, I’m sorry I am working, please ask me about my field. I need one year or two years, and I was just concentrating on that” – and it’s not the topic of the day. No-one dares to say that because we have self-censorship, we have this pressure to not forget that artists they are all the time making this self-censorship because they want to succeed and if I make this, will it be good for my career or not? If I have this space, I have to show that I am engaged. I mean for me sometimes today, disengaging seems to be the most clever way to say “no” because when the mainstream narratives instrumentalise the vocabulary or instrumentalise the notions that come up from the left or from the defenders or the opponents to the mainstream narratives, this is a problem. Who is engaged? Everyone is engaged. You ask everyone, he will vote for a right-winger and he will say “yes I paid twenty euros, yesterday I went to see a Syrian group playing music to support Syria,” I mean, it’s crazy. Everything is confused and everything is instrumentalised. Radicalism today is be completely against, to disengage, voila!
Michael: I was very intrigued by that brief conversation we had on email before we came here. We were just playing around, I guess with some ideas around poetry and philosophy and the notion of death. And that’s the ultimate question that confronts us all, but one of the themes that has raised up in this conference is the death of the social, how society, and the notion of solidarity is dying off and how we are really facing that. Can you perhaps reflect a bit on that?
Meriam: Yes, for me we live in times when we think that we are engaged but we are superficially engaged, we are engaged because we – I don’t want to say all of us, but I can say the majority – a lot among us, they are making business out of victimisation, out of playing the role of the hero who is going to save the victims. So this binary way to look at for example artistic freedom: we have people displaying victimhood and people displaying as the saviours, the heroes, the one who will save the world. This is not a balanced situation because in both sides there is an interest. The big difficulty today when I think about poetry and philosophy is to produce beauty and value. We live in a neo-liberalistic society where everything is tout le monetaire, everything is monetised, so nothing is outside of money. I would like with you tomorrow to make a conference in South Africa or in Tunisia but we need for that to get the money, and to get the money what do we need? We need this applications proposal, we need to master the language…
Michael: Of the donors, to speak in their terms to their interests.
Meriam: Exactly. Already we put for ourselves frames because we have to get the possibility to do it. So pure beauty, this poetry of art for me, I don’t want to politicise art; I think art is political but I am against politicising art; art is important in itself because it’s useless, its way [is] to challenge the structures, the conformists, the orthodoxies, to bring new sight, to bring this pause from everyday life, to bring a moment of release, it’s in itself giving you space to rethink your life. So why should I again politicise art and say we are supporting Syrian artists at risk – because what means artists at risk when everyone is at risk, everyone who is producing in any country is at risk because he is challenging, whatever he is doing. When Paul Klee put feet to the pillars when he was six years old and his teacher said “please you have to draw the aqueduct” and among twenty pupils, one child, Paul Klee, chose to put shoes to the pillars and since then the aqueducts are walking; he opened something in reality that no-one before him saw, no-one drew aqueducts with shoes; it’s completely a new opening in the world. And when you open something like that it is creating for you the ability to see the world in another way, even in your everyday life. So poetry for me is a high form against what we can sell and what we cannot sell, and I think beauty today, the ability to produce beauty, which is not saleable, which is not a product…
Michael: It’s not prettiness; it’s truth.
Meriam: Absolutely. It’s like Kafka says: it’s like the knife which is scratching my mind in order to make me see the reality of what I am and what the world is, and I think it’s this difficulty of saying we are missing solidarity because solidarity means that I believe in you; I don’t do it because I am waiting for something else, I am not waiting for recognition, I am not making money, I am not doing a network, I am not selling a concept, I am not applying a concept. Solidarity for me means, for example, those people during World War Two they were hiding children and they never say it and after fifty years someone found some documents [but] but they did it because it was their ability to judge.
Michael: So when you say I believe in you, it means I see you, I actually truly see you.
Meriam: Exactly. And I judge that I am in a position to do something in order to allow you a chance, or the ability to get something, but I don’t do it out of an obligation. I do it out of trust.
Michael: You are not a symbol for me, you are not a tool in my design. You are different to me, you are your own, but I see you as your own.
Meriam: Exactly. And it’s me who is taking the risk, it’s not the other who is at risk, and the balance of the relationships are different then and this is beauty. Beauty is to recognise the human in you – and this human is enough, that makes me stand up and say I judge for myself that it is my duty in these circumstances that if I have something to do for you I will do it and I don’t need anyone to tell me or to give me the tools to do it, I will find myself the tools to do it. And this kind of beauty is what is missed because we are in very indifferent societies, and very egoistic, individualistic societies, which is why we also need this balance with a big movement, because if we look at the last five to ten years we have this rise of this movement for artistic freedom. It started with journalists and then moved now to artists and is now moving to female or feminist discourses; these movements which are from civil society they are part of the system. For me everything needs to be explained by economics and one of the most important books I read in my life from a contemporary writer and Nobel Prize winner, the Bengali writer Amartya Sen, wrote a book. He’s a scientist but he was very interested to understand why there is this injustice and inequality in the world and he tried to look at what is going on in the economic structures, and how economics shape values, and I think his book The Concept of Justice, is a very interesting as a vision of how our world is shaped and what the economical system makes wrong. He will open a window for making counter-narratives, but counter-narratives that are based on the money they get from this system so it’s just like performing all the time that we are trying to make the change. But why this change never comes when all of us are willing to change the situation, is because it’s just performative, and what makes things change is solidarity, so out of institutions, out of the big mass movements, what we shape in a collectivity is the exception, and beauty also is an exception. As I said what will remain when we read the texts coming from the Greek era, or I read Lalla [the poet Lalleshwari], or I read Omar Khayyam, the same guys left this world one thousand years ago but I stay connected to their writing, so human beings will always face the same difficulties in another context and with other tools, but we have the same existential questions and we can connect through that. Me or you as artists we are so excited to get recognition, to see that others are interested in our work, but a book is written to go through time, traverse le temps; a book is passion, it has time, it has no problem to stay there for five thousand years and someone will read it later. The writer is in a hurry, the book is not in a hurry, the painting is not in a hurry, we are in a hurry, humans are in a hurry. That is why also this kind of responsibility if we see how we are shaping policies, and how we are doing architecture, how we are treating with nature, with overproduction, with climate change, we are just interested in tomorrow and today but not in the long-term. The programmes we are selling here [at Safe Havens] or trying to do, they are maximum two years, nothing after two years. Ask our colleagues: after two years, what are people supposed to do? They will try to be the heroes of their lives and find a solution to stay and if not, they have go back. Do you think that it is easier to go back and to start from the beginning, how difficult for them to restart again from zero after leaving and coming back with nothing? No-one has an answer. I am for the second time in Malmö; I am so happy to be here and to exchange with colleagues and to have more open-heart conversations and these small tables were a good idea, but since last year I am asking the same question and no-one has an answer. As a student, I don’t want to get a fish every night, I want you to teach me how to hunt my fish. This is the investment we have to do as writers or as architects or whatever, because the word is not only today, it’s also the future like other people before us in humanity made a transmission of knowledge, of architecture, of books that we read and we seek in it consolation, we seek in it wisdom, we seek in it healing to continue.
[ENDS]
This interview with my lovely, whip-smart friend Kagiso Lesego Molope, recently published online, was conducted at the Safe Havens 2018 conference of the organisations that protect persecuted creatives, held in December in Sweden.
Michael: My obvious first question is: aren’t you tired of talking about your experience of snow? It’s been twenty years [in exile] now, right?
Kagiso: [Laughs] I still can’t get used to it; I don’t know why. Ja, there is something that makes me uneasy about not being able to see the ground, that’s really my big problem with snow; I don’t mind watching snow fall, or even how cold it is anymore, but there is something about not being able to see the ground that makes me really uneasy; I didn’t grow up like that, I always know where the ground is, but it feels very strange. Have I been talking a lot about snow with you?
Michael: It seems to come up every time we meet, but I guess what I was asking is: because you’ve essentially been abroad for so long, aren’t you tired of talking as if you are a new arriviste, someone just fresh off the boat, as if that is going to be your defining experience forever?
Kagiso: Ja [sigh]… I guess what I’m saying when talking about the cold is having been in a country for twenty years and still struggling to feel like it’s mine. I feel lonely. I think that if I had found a community and I’d felt really embraced by the place then I wouldn’t still be feeling like I’m just arriving, but that feeling is still there; I don’t think that’s the same for other people.
Michael: So that’s a metaphor for some kind of social coldness?
Kagiso: Ja, it is actually; it’s funny because I have thought of it that way. I talk about the cold as if it’s the weather, but I’m actually talking about a very introverted people who find it very difficult to include people they didn’t grow up with, people whose paths they don’t understand. I think everywhere you go, people are much more comfortable with you when they know who your people are; they know, ok, you are so-and-so’s child and you grew up in such-and-such a school; people like to make the connections when they meet each other, especially in Canada. It makes them uneasy to not know where you come from and to not be able to relate to a really large part of who you are, so they exclude you; it’s easier than actually taking the time to learn; I think that’s what happens. Anyway, I’m not saying that’s all of Canada, it’s just the part of Canada I live in. A lot of people grow up in the same city and then they go away to university but then they come back; it’s a very big part of Canadian culture; you go back to where you were raised to raise children, and so that means people are always going back home, so I think it’s very odd to them that someone…
Michael: Would traverse the world and uproot themselves?
Kagiso: Ja. And just not go home, because going home is what everybody does. So I am constantly trying to belong, so in talking about it, I always sound like I am just beginning to enter the country – but in a lot of ways, I am. I mean, in terms of time I’m not because I’ve been there two decades, but socially I feel I am always trying to enter the country, I’m always trying to be a part of it in ways that it won’t let me in. It’s an ongoing struggle for me and I think a big part of the struggle, honestly, is that I’m so very proud to be South African and I talk about being South African, and I talk about myself as a South African person, and I write about South Africa – a really big part of what I do in my work is rediscover South Africa in all its different ways. So it goes both ways: a part of it is I think the country has not embraced me; but I think another part of it is that I also embrace my country so much I don’t talk about it like a place I don’t love because I love my country. But I think northerners – in North America and Europe – don’t understand why you would love Africa because their understanding of Africa is that it’s a very harsh place, you know? People will always ask “but it’s so dangerous in Africa, aren’t you glad you left?” That’s the only thing they seem to know about the country and about Africa, it’s so corrupt and there are these problems and those problems, but people don’t understand that your home is your home and everywhere has problems but you will talk about a place that you love.
Michael: Tell me about those expectations through the lens of hair and dress: because you’ve had that experience of having all these expectations projected on to you that as an African woman you are supposed to look and be a certain way.
Kagiso: Absolutely. I think that most of the immigrants of African descent in Canada have been from the Caribbean and people have one picture of what people from the Caribbean look like, so people think, oh Bob Marley, dreadlocks, or they think well, you are African then you should look more African and wear African dress because that’s what we’ve seen in movies and that’s what we expect Africans to look like. There isn’t this understanding in North America that there are cities in Africa, and by that I mean that you are always placed in the past; I think they always place Africa not in the modern age and they still have this idea of all of Africa as being a very primitive place. I mean they have the same idea about First Nations people within Canada, so I think it’s just a matter of this imperialist look on the world: where there are no Europeans there is no civilisation. They don’t know an Africa that has lights, let alone…
Michael: Aerospace companies and satellites…
Kagiso: Ja. Part of also not being embraced is you don’t fit people’s idea of what an African looks like and what an African talks like. People always say: “You don’t sound African.”
Michael: So apart from not being them, you are also not the kind of other that they want you to be.
Kagiso: [Laughs] Exactly! So you can’t win, so here’s what you do: you either deny who you are to fit into the image of who they need you to be, to be embraced, or you refuse all of that and be isolated, and those I think have been my choices. And at the very beginning I was very desperate to be included and I was wearing dreadlocks – and I don’t like dreadlocks – but I did a couple of different things like wear head-wraps, because sometimes you just long for a friendly embrace so sometimes it is just helpful when you are trying to not be isolated and lonely to have people say “you look really nice, so come to my house for dinner.” But then you realise it doesn’t work for you and you stall and you go back to who you really are and then you end up alone – and then you end up like me talking about not belonging, twenty years later.
Michael: So tell me about your community, in other words the people that you commune with in Canada. What does your community look like?
Kagiso: Ah, I don’t really have a community, I mean I’m in grad school right now so I suppose that would be my new community, but my community is all over the world. Two of my closest friends live in two different countries in Europe and my other really close friend lives in the US.
Michael: So your community is not a geographic community, it’s a community of minds?
Kagiso: It’s a community of minds, ja, all three of those people are writers and all of them I met in some writers’ space, so those tend to be my community.
Michael: So what is it about writers? Obviously they work in the same field as yours, but there must be something else to that writing in that you’re continually trying to interpret your environment and they’re on a similar journey?
Kagiso: Absolutely; I mean they lead very contemplative lives and I think it’s nice to be around and talk to people like that you’re always sharing ideas about how you see the world and how you see yourselves, because we have to engage in that work personally to be a writer and to grow as a writer, your spiritual self and how you feed that and how you take care of that part of yourself. Those are conversations I can have with writers, especially fiction writers. Fiction writers have to be involved in the growth of the people they write about so they have to also be very actively engaged, they have to show up in their own personal ways in order to do well in their work. But one writer friend who actually isn’t a fiction writer said something to me recently that really stuck and that was that the writer in society is not traditionally deep in the community; the writer is always a little bit on the outside because you have to be further out to have a clearer view of your society. So I agree with it and think it is true and I think you’re not going to write honestly about the society you live in if you are too steeped in it, so that’s part of the isolation as well. If you look at it that way, then it seems ok, but some days it just seems too difficult because everybody wants people around them [but] I think it becomes too hard to be part of a community as a writer. Most writers I know, their community is composed of other writers and artists or they really just don’t have friends where they live and their friends are all far away.
Michael: So to some degree it is a lonely choice because writing is a solitary task in and of itself and does require some remove from those around one. What are the trends in writing that are exciting you at the moment; are there any? It may even be something old that you discovered, not necessarily something new?
Kagiso: Um, I don’t know if this is new, I don’t think it is. There are two things. There is a large group of black women in South Africa writing memoirs; that’s very exciting for me because we didn’t grow up reading books about black women so for us to say that our stories matter, and I was writing alone in the world. I think that’s very powerful and I think there is going to be a generation of young girls growing up with these books about African women, by African women, for African women and that will be very empowering.
Michael: Karima [Bennoune, UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights] indicated that the very first point of ingress against any culture by a hostile force invariably assaulted the cultural rights of its women first, so if this new layer is being developed it’s going to have to be quite tough because it’s at the forefront of whatever gets thrown against that society by people who disapprove of it.
Kagiso: Aha, absolutely. It’s funny, you know, when I was growing up under apartheid, my father used to say that the future of South Africa was in black women’s hands and I think it’s because he had four girls and he really needed to say that [laughs]. But I think it’s a very powerful movement that’s happening and I think it’s coming up against a lot of criticism and I think they’re not being embraced by the larger publishing houses – but they just don’t care. So there are a few young black women writers who are building their own publishing houses so there’s one called Impepho which was started a few months ago by a woman called Vangile Gantsho and she is a poet, and then there is BlackBird which is an imprint of Jacana, and then [name unclear] who just started her own publishing house. So that is happening and it looks unstoppable when you look at it from that perspective.
Michael: Presumably what that means is first of all a greater diversity of voices in more vernacular languages, but also I’m presuming very soon we are going to start leaving biography behind and start getting into all sorts of genres, science fiction, philosophy, science, or what have you?
Kagiso: Ja, absolutely. There’s no limit. And it’s already happening. You get Pumla Gqola, she writes a lot on African politics, so that’s really exciting. I haven’t read a lot of science fiction but I know that there are a couple of people who want to write science fiction, but right now part of the trend is really addressing trauma and linking black women’s trauma to apartheid, because there is sort of this tradition in South Africa where everything bad started in 1994 [with the first all-race elections] but then you get these women who survived apartheid and want to talk to how their personal trauma is very much linked to the world they grew up in, to broader societal trauma. And I wholly support that. When I started writing in the early 2000s, I remember a really big publishing house in South Africa coming out and saying “we are not interested in apartheid stories, apartheid was in the past and we are excited only about black writers who are writing about South African politics now and South African society post-‘94” and I thought it was just appalling and obnoxious because they were calling on us to just forget the effects of the past, but also they wanted us to participate in their project of forgetting apartheid – which is not going to happen. So what I do like about what a lot of the black women are doing is they are addressing those issues which come from growing up under the apartheid regime and looking and linking them to how life is now.
Michael: Could you critique this prevalent notion, which has become a trope, of the “strong black woman”. There’s a demand that you have to be a strong black woman; you can’t be a contemplative black woman, or a mousy black woman, a shy and retiring black woman, or a black woman riven with self-doubt; you just have to be this uncarved block of solidity. Because on one front, environmentally, you have to be strong, but that denies you the full spectrum of your humanity.
Kagiso: Exactly. And part of what I like about the poetry from black women coming out now is them presenting themselves as sad, depressed, traumatised people – and able to handle all kinds of things – but also able to acknowledge the difficulties they face and to acknowledge that we fall apart sometimes. That is dehumanising to say that someone has to be this one thing; it’s taking away your humanity; we’re all complex, we all have feelings, life gets very hard for us – especially hard for us with everything that we have to deal with. I’ll give you an example of This Book Betrays My Brother: I went to Durban to the writers’ festival to promote the book. I got harassed in the session that I was giving about the book and I had to run out because it felt physically unsafe for me to be there. And when I told the organisers about it, they said “ja, but you’re a black woman, you guys are so strong, you can handle it.” But I have a right to be afraid and a right to be protected. But they compared me to another black woman who came there and had been harassed and had not complained and I felt like I was failing at being the black woman at that festival, I was not being the right black woman, I was failing at black womanhood [laughs]. And I think a lot of us are fighting against that image of what a black woman looks like because we shouldn’t be told what a black woman looks like or how she should behave, it should be up to us. But essentially it denies you the right to be human, it denies you the right to seek safety when you need it, to fall apart when you need to.
Michael: This ties in in my mind to this rising tide of reactionary black populism and its idealised version of black history and particularly pre-colonial history in which black people obviously never fought over anything, in which all wars that they ever waged were obviously on the side of the angels. This to me seems to fundamentally deny black people agency – under the guise of granting them agency. It’s about this projection of this idealised human.
Kagiso: Mm-hmm. It is under the guise of granting them agency.
[ENDS]
As we brace ourselves for what is shaping up to be rough and wild national election, I thought it interesting to reflect on where these major sea-changes originated, with the rise of the Chinese-funded, black-chauvinist, right-populist EFF to kingmaker status in several metro municipalities back in the local government elections of October 2016. This was a cover story in the black woman's magazine Destiny, “Inside Our Fiery City Councils,” Johannesburg, December 2016.
Michael Schmidt
As the brutalist apartheid architecture of the Joburg Metro’s Council building, its narrow windows looking down like gun-ports, gives way to its replacement, a giant R280-million drum-round lekgotla structure with huge transparent windows emphasising openness, so tight one-party dominance in the country’s heartland has given way to dynamically shifting coalitions.
At the second sitting of the new Council – still in the old chamber, now filled to bursting as it has expanded dramatically from the apartheid era’s 50 councillor’s seats to 270 seats – proceedings on 13 September were more polite than in the National Assembly the same week, but the country’s new opposition-in-waiting, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) provided most of the expected colour, in their red overalls and doeke or construction helmets, in their stand-up comedy, and in their jiving dances.
The week before the meeting, large-framed Protocol Officer Frans Sheleng, who was a council labourer under apartheid before rising up through the ranks, had told me: “We took advice from Parliament on disciplinary issues and dress code. Those hardhats they [the EFF] have, they throw, and people could get hurt. We have to supply water bottles, but they throw those also. We are considering whether we need a sergeant-at-arms… but we don’t want to go that route.”
Yet the mercurial nature of the second sitting gave fair warning that politics will hereafter be as unpredictable as Joburg’s formerly regular-as-clockwork weather. This is especially so because the unseated African National Congress (ANC) seemed unable to reconcile to the fact that although it is the largest party with 121 seats, it has no clear majority and is now easily outvoted by the ruling Democratic Alliance (DA) with its 104 seats, its one-seat-each coalition partners, the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), Congress of the People (COPE), United Democratic Movement (UDM), and Freedom Front Plus (FF+), with its separate agreement with the five-seat Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) – but only when given the tactical support of the 30-seat EFF king-makers.
Perhaps the locations of the main parties’ Joburg offices are telling: the DA sits on a leafy block of Rissik Street downtown; the ANC is wedged between fast food outlets on Gandhi Square; while the EFF is located on De Korte Street, in the hipster boondocks of Braamfontein. With a whopping 49% of Johannesburg’s residents under the age of 34, this is a distinctly young city and the EFF seems to understand that more than most.
A Fighters song rhyming Mandela with Malema got a few in the DA seats grooving, but left the ANC bloc very unimpressed; while another song, sung after the EFF forced the DA to receive a delegation of its own employees, aggrieved at not having been paid for elections services (including one of whom had allegedly been run over by a DA councillor’s car), had some in the ANC jolling along delightedly.
Although the DA and ANC religiously applauded their own speakers, the EFF and minority parties readily shifted their praise to whomsoever seemed most deserving, so the red bloc clapped when DA Speaker Vasco da Gama (freighted with history, as his namesake was the first European to round the Cape in 1497) shut down one of his own party’s councillors who had not properly asked to be recognised.
After his acceptance speech – delayed to the second sitting in respect for ANC councillor Nonhlanhla Mthembu who died during the first sitting – the DA’s new Executive Mayor, bald hair-products king Herman Mashaba, chided the ANC, sitting grumpily in the opposition seats for the first time since democracy came in 1994, for quibbling about not being in power. Veteran municipal journalist Anna Cox of The Star said that previously, the ANC had always jeered at the opposition after it effortlessly steamrollered policies over the DA, so it would be fascinating to see how the parties behaved now the tables were turned.
ANC caucus leader Geoffrey Makhubo, who surrendered his finance seat on the Metro Council after the elections, responded with umbrage to Mashaba’s characterisation of the “World Class City” as one in decay, saying “The ANC built this city into what it is today… It attracts 10,000 people a month looking for opportunities – and the mayor calls this decay.” He then went on to grumble about the ANC being, as he incorrectly put it, the “majority” party. Mashaba drolly riposted that Makhubo “seems to need more time to accept the result of the election. We hope he accepts it by 2021,” he said, meaning the end of his own five-year term.
The EFF’s witty Silumko Mabona jibed the mayor, in reference to his cosmetics empire, asking him, “What is Black Like Me in your programme? We elected you beyond political and racial lines but it seems you are sleeping on the job.” He then claimed that the DA leader’s emphasis on resolving the housing crisis in the city was borrowed directly from the EFF’s election platform – and yet he received DA applause. The EFF’s councillor for Alexandra, Musa Novela, had a go at the ANC, quipping that “we must thank the Son of God for visiting Joburg,” a reference to the frequent pre-election ANC boast that the party would “rule until Jesus returns.”
The Johannesburg over which the DA coalition now rules is a metropolis with all the hubris and squalour of a frontier town, ranging from the poplar-lined avenues of Houghton, one of the continent’s wealthiest enclaves, to the dregs of an inner city that reeks of urine like an elephant house at a zoo. Yet this powerhouse of the African economy, with a population close to 4,5-million (three quarters of them black), generates 16.5% of the country's wealth and employs 12% of the national workforce.
Its Metro controls a R45,3-billion operational expenditure budget and a R9,5-billion capital expenditure budget over 2016/2017 – and Mashaba has already worked out ways to spend what remains.
The DA played a slick game, with Mashaba spelling out a policy that attempted to balance an anti-graft, clean city, pro-business approach with poverty alleviation.
But a woman leader who knows poverty intimately and looks set to become one of the most strident voices in the chamber is the Patriotic Alliance’s sole councillor, Leanne Williams. Hailing from Eldorado Park, Williams is the child of a father who ran off when she was five, and fell pregnant at 19 – but at 24 she decided to turn her life around; today she has three degrees, and prior to joining the PA was head of risk at a leading bank.
In the chamber, she told the councillors that the DA’s economics seemed “more like witchcraft” when they failed to address backyard dwellers, pit toilets and the scourge of drugs. To wild EFF and ANC applause, she said “Some of us are here to represent the marginalised – and not white privilege!”
She told Destiny later: “My ambition is not to become a politician when it is about seat-warming.” Dismissive of the three mainstream parties, which she predicted had already peaked, she said the new coalition politics, far from being indicative of political maturity, was a sign of decay, citing “the DA-EFF Kardashian marriage,” and the lack of focus on empowering the marginalised, especially women who in the Metro were mostly reduced to backbenchers.
One woman who is not a backbencher the DA’s MMC for Community Development Nonhlanhla Sifumba. Born and still living in Orlando West, home of Winnie Mandela, Sifumba described herself to Destiny as liberal-minded and insatiably curious. Although she grew up in a politically-charged environment of regular protests which she participated in as a child, she embarked on a bewildering array of jobs before cutting her teeth in politics proper with the Independent Electoral Commission in 2006, and enlisted as a DA councilor in 2011.
Asked whether she saw her portfolio, which covers sports and recreation, libraries and information services, arts, culture and heritage, city parks, zoos and cemeteries, as a soft portfolio, Sifumba said, “No: this social part is critical to people’s life; it’s the heart of the city. People want to live in a beautiful city, so actually I am the MMC for Happiness.”
A half-hour trip by Gautrain to the north, Tshwane may be the country’s executive capital, but despite its population of around 3-million (also three quarters black, but with a larger white percentage than Joburg), and its R28,3-billion opex and R4,5-billion capex budgets, its Metro is altogether more modest than Joburg’s. Its offices are currently situated in the four-storey Sammy Marks shopping mall, which is half a construction site, overlooking two other diggings, that of the chamber’s new home (a prosaic purple-trimmed concrete block), and that of the new Women’s Monument at Lilian Ngoyi Square which commemorates the 1956 women’s march on the Union Buildings.
Metro Executive Mayor “Just call me Solly” Msimanga of the DA scored points with his new electorate by outlawing the hated “blue light” convoys in the capital – except for those of President Zuma and his Cabinet – and courted controversy by instituting forensic audits into what he claimed was capital overspend by the previous ANC administration.
The balance of power in Tshwane – where the security fencing around the Paul Kruger statue gives notice of a divided city – is only slightly in the DA’s favour – with 93 seats to the ANC’s 89 which, while still not a majority, gives the ruling alliance of the DA, ACDP, and FF+ together 98 seats, meaning again, the 25-seater EFF holds the swing vote.
ANC Tshwane caucus leader Mapiti Matsena complained at the first sitting on 30 August – at which unpopular ANC mayoral candidate Thoko Didiza was noticeably absent – that “mayoral council does not represent the demography of the City of Tshwane… it is without women...” But this is patently untrue – and one of the most powerful elected women in the country is now Tshwane Metro Speaker Katlego Rachel Mathebe.
Born in Kimberley but raised in Mabopane in then Bophuthatswana, she was politicised in Shoshanguve as a member of UDF affiliate Young Christian Students, and on graduating in Port Elizabeth, worked for a wide range of entities mostly as a financial officer. When Thabo Mbeki was ousted, she joined COPE, becoming a Tshwane councillor for the party in 2001, then joining the DA.
Mathebe told Destiny that her election as speaker came as no surprise because “as a young girl, I had the conviction that I cannot tolerate injustice… and what was happening in Tshwane, this was not what I fought for: I fought for liberation as in the right to vote, but also for a classless society… to reduce the difference between poor and rich… I cannot fold my arms and see the country going the wrong way, especially with the levels of looting.”
Mathebe was forced to adjourn the chamber at the first sitting after the EFF and ANC scuffled over black hairstyles at the Pretoria School for Girls. She stated that racism in the city was derived from economic inequality, which the DA has sworn to address by reducing unemployment and by tackling the city’s racialised spatial planning – which the ANC had failed to address. While she believed she had the respect and support of all the parties, ANC and EFF backbenchers holding on to past grudges kept provoking each other, so Tshwane was going to bring in EthicsSA to train councillors in civic virtues.
The unelected officials I spoke to seemed comfortable with DA assurances that, bar a little tweaking of priorities, the ANC-set long-term strategies for the cities – Tshwane Vision 2055, and Joburg’s Growth & Development Strategy 2040 – would remain largely unchanged, while their integrated development plans (IDPs) would by law have to take guidance from ward level every year. But Anna Cox told me she’d heard dark mutterings in the hallways of sabotage along the lines of “we don’t work for the DA,” and said there had even been rumours of an attempt to bug Mashaba’s office. Time will tell if the ANC’s assiduous cadre deployment over the past two decades works for or against democracy in future.
[ENDS]
Comment l’Afrique se paye la présidence française
Michael Schmidt, Afrique du Sud, 2011 (traduit par Vidal Cuervo, Alternative Libertaire, France)
Il semblerait que depuis peu, en Afrique, on ne serve plus la soupe exactement dans l’ordre habituel. De curieux renversements s’effectuent en effet, dont le moindre n’est pas celui du Portugal, suppliant son ancienne colonie, l’Angola, de lui venir en aide ; ou encore de voir des citoyens européens se repliant sur leurs colonies de jadis pour fuir la crise dans leurs pays, et accepter des jobs sous-payés dans l’arrière-pays africain (1).
Mais il existe une relation bien plus ancienne et plus discrète entre Afrique et Europe qui renverse l’image convenue de leaders africains corrompus par une aide-européenne-sous-conditions. Ce phénomène est celui de la valise (en français dans le texte), système par lequel depuis un demi-siècle les dictatures africaines ont envoyé des millions en France pour corrompre le processus politique européen.
Le premier tour des élections françaises se tiendra le 22 avril prochain. On s’attend que le candidat socialiste François Hollande prenne le dessus sur le président gaulliste sortant Nicolas Sarkozy, sans obtenir toutefois de majorité préparant le décor à une fuite de capitaux en mai.
Toutefois, les électeurs français connaissent le système de la valise, il est donc intéressant d’examiner ce phénomène si bien intégré à la conduite des affaires franco-africaines, et qui semble se répandre encore.
Le 5 octobre 2011, le Centre d’Etudes Françaises et Francophones de la Duke University (Caroline du Nord) organisait un débat intitulé « les colonies rendent la monnaie de la pièce: culture et corruption dans les relations franco-africaines ». Notre article reprend des extraits de ce colloque.
La France post-coloniale, une république « valisière »
Philippe Bernard, ancien correspondant du Monde en Afrique, entama le débat en faisant la remarquer que Robert Bourgi, (2) conseiller « non-officiel » de Sarkozy, avait accusé (septembre 2011) son prédécesseur Jacques Chirac et son premier ministre Dominique de Villepin, d’avoir reçu d’énormes pots-de-vin sous la forme de valises remplies d’espèces, pendant la mandature conservatrice de ces derniers (1995-2007) , aux fins de financer la campagne de Chirac.
Cinq états d’Afrique de l’Ouest et Centrale étaient concernés - Congo, Burkina Faso, Sénégal, Côte d’Ivoire et Gabon. Dans une interview à Canal+, Bourgi soutenait également que la campagne en 1988 de Jean-Marie le Pen du Front National (extrême-droite) fut en partie financée de la même manière. Chirac, autant que Villepin ont nié les allégations de Bourgi.
Selon la recension par le Telegraph (3) Bourgi, déclarait au Journal du Dimanche qu’il avait personnellement transporté des dizaines de millions de francs chaque année, les montants étant destinés aux courses à la présidence, sous-entendant par-là que le liquide était destiné aux campagnes de Chirac. « J’ai vu Chirac et Villepin compter l’argent devant moi ».
Le même Bourgi soutient qu’il fit passer des billets de la part de 5 présidents africains: Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal [au pouvoir de 2000-2012]; Blaise Campaoré du Burkina Faso
[1987 à ce jour]; Laurent Gbagbo de la Côte d’Ivoire [2000-2011]; Denis Sassou Nguesso du Congo [1997 à ce jour] et Omar Bongo du Gabon [1967-2009], que M. Bourgi appellait « Papa ».
Ensemble, il prétend qu’ils auraient contribué quelques 6,2 million de livres sterling à la campagne gagnée de Chirac en 2002.
Un sixième leader se serait joint au club des donateurs, le président Obiang N’Guema de Guinée équatoriale [1979 à ce jour] avant qu’un Villepin, rendu nerveux ne mette fin au système en 2005. Toujours selon Bourgi.
Ce dernier affirme avoir personnellement fait fonctionner le système pendant 25 ans, en échange duquel les dictateurs africains se voyaient accorder d’immenses réductions de leur dettes envers la France, une fois leur « sponsor » à l’Elysée.
Bernard pense que le système est né de concept de « Françafrique », ce mélange des genres entre intérêts français et africains.
Secret public depuis les libérations africaines des années 60, à partir desquelles des accords furent signés stipulant que la France userait de son influence pour defender les régimes africains, tandis que ceux-ci donnerait une exclusive à l’ancienne puissance colonial sur ses matières premières et un droit d’intervention militaire, à l’occasion de menaces contre la sécurité africaine.
Dans les années 80, les gaullistes (opposés alors au gouvernement socialiste de François Mitterand) furent pareillement accusés de toucher un pourcentage des revenus du pétrole gabonais pour financer leurs campagnes – mais sans preuves.
Le professeur Stephen Smith, ancien responsable du bureau Afrique de Libération, et prédécesseur de Bernard au Monde, se souvient des rumeurs disant que « l’argent à destination du bureau du premier ministre étaient dissimulé dans des djembe ». Ce bureau ne disposant pas de l’air conditionné, l’imaginer en train de compter son argent en bras de chemise est assez amusant ».
Plus sérieusement, Smith se souvient qu’en 1971, au tout début d’un règne qui ne devait finir qu’en 1993 Félix Houphouët-Boigny, président de Côte d’Ivoire avait fait don de « sacs d’argent » au gouvernement de Georges Pompidou.
Il y avait, dit Smith “une pratique continue, depuis Charles de Gaulle [au pouvoir de 1959 à 1969] à Giscard d’Estaing [1974-1981], jusqu’aux gouvernements libéraux actuels ». Tous soutenus par le système de la valise. Ce qui revient, de fait, à un Etat postcolonial informel ».
Il faut se souvenir que cette période – la Vème république – fut créée en 1958 à la suite de la crise qui devait précipiter la France dans la guerre d’Algérie. Nous sommes donc face à un demi-siècle de dictateurs africains, installés et maintenus en poste par la puissance militaire française, qui grâce au pétrole d’Afrique et autres revenus, devait soutenir à son tour, une chaîne de régimes conservateurs en France. Smith note toutefois que le système de la valise à l’oeuvre dans les 6 pays mentionnés, était également relayé au moyen d’entreprises françaises présentes dans les anciennes colonies.
Les unes payaient les conservateurs gaullistes, tandis quels autres s’occupaient des socialistes et communistes. Etant donné la position stratégique de la France en Europe, son influence n’étant égalée que par l’Allemagne et la Grande Bretagne, quiconque est en mesure de se payer la présidence française, s’achète de fait également, une énorme part d’influence en Europe.
Les politiques progressistes des deux continents ont été rendues inopérantes par ces tractations secrètes.
Smith raconte son premier scoop concernant les pratiques occultes du ténébreux Bourgi, pour Libération en 1995. Il s’agissait d’un papier expliquant la manière dont le dictateur zaïrois Mobutu se vit acquitter de ses dettes, hors de toute procédure. Mobutu « éleva son sceptre et je craignis qu’il ne me frappe avec! ». Robert Bourgi touchait 600 000 euros de Mobutu, pour éteindre un feu et en gagnait un million supplémentaire pour m’empêcher d’écrire le livre que j’avais en cours. »
« La comptabilité de Bourgi est impeccable, il ne fait affaire qu’en liquide, donc il y a peu de preuves disponibles ». L’argent du pot de vin devait être déposé sur des comptes Sud-africains ou libanais, raconte Smith.
La portée du pouvoir officieux de Bourgi était considérable. Smith raconte que lorsque Sarkozy voulut qu’on le prenne en photo avec Mandela – vieillissant, quasi-reclus et n’accordant que très rarement de photos - il suffit à Bourgi d’appeler « Papa » (Omar Bongo), qui persuada l’ancien président d’Afrique du sud de prendre l’avion pour Paris en 2007.
Elargissement du système de la Valise
Professeur Achille Membe, spécialiste de l’Afrique postcoloniale ajoute que la valise est un système de « corruption mutuelle » qui a « menotté la France comme l’Afrique depuis des décennies ».
« La relation n’est pas seulement corrompue en termes d’argent … il s’agit d’une corruption culturelle qui a émasculé les sociétés civiles africaines en profondeur. Les perspectives sont les suivantes, la France dispose encore de bases militaires sur le continent avec les moyens de dégager un Gbagbo. Mais si elle doit payer le prix fort d’une intervention, elle y réfléchira à deux fois ».
La mainmise de la France sur le continent africain, selon Bernard, commence à être éclipsée (notamment par les États-Unis): (4) ce qui impacte la monnaie francophone (le franc CFA) lié à l’euro en crise, ainsi que les entreprises françaises qui perdent leur exclusivité auprès des régimes africains, à mesure que le FMI reprend les rênes dans de nombreux pays, ou que la Chine, le Brésil et l’Inde déversent leurs investissements sur le continent.
Sarkozy lui, veut mettre un terme à un « réseau d’intermédiaires », tels que Bourgi « agissant comme une diplomatie parallèle ».
Pour Smith, la France gagne plus financièrement de ses relations avec l’Afrique anglophone – Afrique du Sud et Kenya en particulier - qu’il ne le faisait avec ses anciennes colonies, mais il prévient : « on assiste à une multiplication des modèles d’exception à la française : la relation avec la Chine est tout aussi corrompue ; la chasse gardée, le privilège français est devenu mondialisé ».
Membe ajoute que selon lui, le palissement de l’étoile française est surtout au fait que la France elle-même est entrée dans un processus de provincialisation, de conservatisme culturel et de retrait des affaires du monde – et ce, bien que sa langue continue d’être dominante en Afrique, et malgré l’existence d’une diaspora de lettrés africains.
Toujours pour Membe les « révélations de Robert Bourgi », n’en sont pas vraiment en Afrique, où « elles n’ont pas été perçues comme un scandale » en raison du cynisme qui domine lorsqu’on évoque les relations franco-africaines dont on connaît depuis longtemps le déclin progressif.
« La géographie n’est plus centrée sur Paris… les Robert Bourgi sont les derniers spasmes d’un équation morte, à genoux, qui n’est plus historique mais anecdotique. La France va devenir une parenthèse ».
Mais il est n’est pas du tout évident que le système des valises soit terminé, ou qu’il ait perdu sa capacité à influencer l’histoire africaine.
Pour Smith la réputation-même de Sarkozy devint douteuse lorsqu’il barra d’un trait 40% des dettes du Congo et du Gabon, là où Chirac l’avait positionné à 8% seulement. Effectuer des paiements à Sarkozy aurait donc constitué un « bon investissement de la part de leaders africains ». Si Sarkozy aussi est impliqué, la fin de partie jouée par Bourgi et consistant à déballer l’affaire des valises après 25 ans, et
affirmant qu’elles se sont arrêtées avec Chirac, ne vise donc pas à salir Chirac. L’homme est mourant et politiquement fini. Il s’agit donc plutôt de menacer Sarkozy tant qu’il est encore président, le forçant à permettre à Bourgi de se retirer en toute quiétude, sans craindre de poursuite, à 67 ans, dans sa demeure nouvellement acquise en Corse.
Les racines du système sont à chercher, selon Smith, dans le fait qu’à l’époque où les Européens sont venus en Afrique, ils se sont « déboutonné » enclenchant cette relation fondée sur la corruption. Mais il faut être deux pour danser le Tango, alors que dire du rôle des leaders africains eux-mêmes? « Si j’étais à leur place, reconnaît Smith, je continuerai d’investir dans la France. Car l’ONU, le FMI … continueront de se tourner vers la France quand il leur faut de l’aide, même si son bras de levier n’est plus aussi efficace. Les choix des présidents africains continuent d’avoir de l’importance ».
Il est clair que le système des valises va perdurer, pour s’élargir sans doute à de nouvelles puissances - USA, Chine, Brésil, Inde et Afrique du Sud – et ironie du sort, le taux de croissance du continent étant de 5,5 %, il est bien possible que la capacité de l’Afrique à influencer et corrompre les affaires du monde… augmente.
(1) un exemple de ces contes (en anglais) : www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/business/global/14angolabiz.html
(2) Né à Dakar, dans une famille libano-française, Il fut admis au barreau de Paris. Ancien conseiller de Chirac et Villepin, Sarkozy lui accordera la Légion d’honneur en 2007.
(3) Un exemple de ces contes (en anglais): /news/worldnews/europe/france/8756097/Jacques-Chirac-regularly-received-cash-from-African-leaders.html
(4) Dans les années 1960s, il y avait 20 000 soldats français stationnés en Afrique. Ils sont 5000 aujourd’hui, mais avec une capacité technique largement supérieure. Au Mali, toutefois, qui vient de vivre un coup d’Etat, la présence étasunienne est significative, tandis que les Français ont indiqué qu’ils n’interviendraient pas comme ils le faisaient par le passé. Sarkozy a rouvert la base militaire en côte d’ivoire qui sent largement la naphtaline, mais l’intervention française de 2011 se fit sous mandat de l’Onu.
[FIN]
This article appeared last year in the journal Fresh Perspectives, a publication of IETM, Arts Everywhere and Musagetes (cover above). Thanks to diligent editor Sidd Joag.
05. RELOCATION OF ARTISTS AT RISK
With respect to relocation of artists in danger, there continues to exist a binary logic of safety and danger being associated with the Global North and South respectively. The tendency to
relocate artists from the Global South to Western Europe or North America has overlooked the potential of and need for interregional support networks for persecuted individuals and communities. In response, some international networks/organizations like ICORN are actively pursuing collaborations to expand safe haven options in the Global South, including Michael Schmidt’s work in South Africa (see below), the Arts Rights Justice Academy regional laboratories in Salvador, Brazil and Beirut, Lebanon.
African Safe Havens Initiatives
Michael Schmidt. Convenor, Southern African Cities of Refuge Project
With repeated failures by UN peace-keeping missions to protect refugees, Africa has probably done better by its animals than by its people – so I was intrigued when introduced in 2012 to the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN), which provides refuge for persecuted writers, artists and activists. ICORN wanted to expand its network of cities into the developing world. The desire to do so was partly to prevent ICORN becoming another “West saves the Rest” initiative, as well as to reduce the culture shock experienced by displaced people. For example, when Kenyan poet Philo Ikonya was relocated to Norway by ICORN, her teenage son had to learn Norwegian to complete his schooling; he could have studied in English were they relocated to South Africa.
Back in 2012, ICORN’s sole city outside Western Europe was Mexico City. Since then it has expanded to include – apart from new cities in North America – Oaxaca in Mexico and Belo Horizonte in Brazil, with more being negotiated elsewhere. In Southern Africa, we are targeting the cities of Windhoek in Namibia, plus Cape Town, Johannesburg and the university town of Stellenbosch in South Africa, to bring them on board as ICORN cities. The project was founded under the aegis of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism of which I was then Executive Director. After moving to freelance work in 2015, I relocated project oversight to the Professional Journalists’ Association, and PEN’s South African chapter has since partnered with us.
Progress has been steady but slow, as working with universities and municipalities can be bureaucratic. However, the project held launches in Johannesburg in May and in Cape Town in July 2014 to introduce academics and city officials to the Cities of Refuge concept; films relevant to the exiled creative experience were screened – Beate Arnestad’s Silenced Voices on Sri Lankan journalists and Marion Stalens’ Silence or Exile on ICORN guest writers. Because most exiled creatives – whether choreographers, film directors, poets, journalists or painters – want to continue doing what got them into trouble in their home countries, the project requires the assistance of third parties to give them that platform. So we have engaged the Universities of Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Stellenbosch to explore possibilities – and have also established relations with the Holocaust and Genocide Centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town because of our mutual interest in interrogating issues of migration and prejudice.
So far, the most progress has been made in Cape Town where, initially, the fact that the city is run by the opposition Democratic Alliance assured that its decisions in this regard would not be aligned to national politics and foreign policy concerns (this is why ICORN works at city and not national level). We conducted an ICORN tour of Cape Town in May 2015, bringing guest writers Parvin Ardalan, an Iranian journalist, and Ramy Essam, an Egyptian musician, to meet officials, academics, and activists, and were tentatively offered a defunct museum in a converted suburban house as a possible ICORN residence. A bilateral agreement signed in 2016 between the mayors of Cape Town and Malmö in Sweden, a City of Refuge, will now be used to drive that project to signature and activation – hopefully in 2018.
Stellenbosch has proven slower. The original mayor who we met with in 2015 has been replaced, but the local university’s journalism department is interested in the project. Johannesburg was revived in 2017 by a range of discussions on possible venues that incorporate theatres, dance studios, computer rooms, exhibition spaces, and residential apartments. There, our project coincides with a similar initiative by the Pan-African Human Rights Defenders’ Network (PAHARDN) which aims at establishing Safe Hubs for persecuted human rights defenders in: Johannesburg, because of its cosmopolitanism; Kampala, Uganda, because of it successfully absorbed Somali and Burundian refugees; Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, because of a new law explicitly providing for such safe haven, and; Tunis in Tunisia, because of its new democratic dispensation; the initiative was launched in October 2017 with ICORN participation: online here.
In June 2016, we relocated a Zimbabwean human rights defender in exile in South Africa to Windhoek, Namibia, who was seriously at risk of assassination by state agents. Two of his colleagues had already been murdered and one narrowly survived a poisoning. Relocation funds were provided by the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT). It was an operation fraught with danger that almost failed twice and resulted in the defender eventually returning to South Africa. But it taught us valuable lessons about such relocations which we shared at a conference with PAHRDN in August 2016. We have since, in 2017, successfully relocated a persecuted poet and blogger from Lesotho to South Africa, and are involved in monitoring the status of several other at-risk creatives. Our hope is that 2018 will finally see the project mature with Cape Town and perhaps Johannesburg signing on as ICORN cities.
[In fact, things did consolidate in late 2018 and a safe havens initiative will shortly be launched in Johannesburg. I will post details about that soon]
[ENDS]
This is an extract from Drinking With Ghosts (BestRed, 2014):
The final phases of the battle to save white Rhodesia
attracted an eclectic assortment of soldiers of fortune, white
supremacist ideologues, military specialists, desperadoes
and opportunists. The main recruiter was Major Nicholas
Lamprecht of the Rhodesian Light Infantry, who, according
to Stuart Christie’s probing study of neo-fascist networks,
Stefano delle Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist, ‘recruited and
trained’ the ‘Rhodesian mercenaries … (39 in June, 21 in July
and 34 in September 1976)’ – drawing many from the ranks
of the 1 500-strong Frankfurt-based neo-Nazi organisation
the Kampfbund Deutscher Soldaten (German Soldiers’
Combat League), co-founded by Dr Eberhardt Taubert.
Taubert, who died in 1976, was a shadowy figure who
had joined the Nazi Party in 1931, rising to the rank of SS
Sturmführer under Josef Goebbels in Berlin, and later
becoming chief of Nazi anti-communist propaganda in the
occupied territories. Taubert found refuge South Africa
and Iran after the Second World War, before returning to
Germany in 1950 when he was recruited into the ex-Nazi
anti-communist Gehlen Organisation, worked for CIA front
companies, and advised NATO on psychological warfare.
Christie writes: ‘For over twenty years Taubert was the main
source of finance to the neo-Nazi and extreme right groups
in Europe, acting as a conduit for money from businesses
and foundations …’
Christie also notes links between the South African
military and the neo-Nazi networks: ‘In 1972 the Bolivian
businessman and security adviser Klaus Altmann, otherwise
known as Klaus Barbie, named Otto Skorzeny [the SS
special forces colonel who had rescued Mussolini, another
Taubert associate] as the chief of the Die Spinne [The Spider]
network which Barbie claimed commanded the loyalty of
100 000 fascist sympathisers in 22 countries and which was
funded by Nazi investments controlled by Skorzeny … Also
in 1972, Otto Skorzeny met various South African generals.
One of his close friends and colleagues in South Africa was
Lieutenant-General Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin,
ex-Chief of Staff of 4 Panzer Army, a director of Trek
Airways, an airline which specialises in police and security
charter operations in South Africa.’ In 1973, according to
Christie, the Washington Post identified Skorzeny ‘as being a
major arms broker for Portugal and an agent of the massive
Interarms company based in Virginia. Skorzeny, the paper
alleged, had been trafficking in arms for many years to many
sub-Saharan African countries. On 6 July 1975 Skorzeny died
in Madrid to be followed on 21 November by Franco.’
[ENDS]
The year 1919 in many ways marks a watershed in human history. Although many anarchist organisations would grow into the 1920s, particularly in Spain, Korea, Manchuria, China and elsewhere, for most it was their high-water mark from which they gradually lost ground to the reformist, communist left and the reactionary, fascist right. It was one of the most terrifyingly dynamic years of the turbulent 20th Century. The Russian Civil War was in full flood and in Ukraine, the anarchist-inspired Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine (RPAU) was at the peak of its powers, fully 110,000-strong, with an estimated 250,000 in reserve, organised in four corps in Crimea, Yekaterinoslav, Oleksandrivsk and Gulyai-Polye - under the civilian control of the Congress of Workers, Peasants and Insurgents (KBOP) representing 2,5-million people in a free territory of 27,000km². In the year of the formation of the Comintern, red revolutions were sweeping Europe, from the Spartakist Rising in Germany to the formation of the Hungarian Soviet, while the Tragic Week in Argentina saw the anarcho-syndicalist forces fail to defeat a better-armed state. Counter-revolution was also on the march, with the founding of the Combat Groups (Fascisti) in Italy, of the German Workers' Party (precursor to the Nazis) in Germany, the Yuzonsha (an early ultra-nationalist party) in Japan and the seizure of Hungary by Admiral Horthy - not to mention the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg by Freikorps in Berlin and the assassination of Emiliano Zapata in Mexico.
Imperialism was embattled as the the last Austro-Hungarian king went into exile, the Turkish Independence War, Third Anglo-Afghan War, and Anglo-Irish wars broke out, destined to result in the independence of Turkey, Afghanistan and Eire, while in the Far East, the Philippines gained independence from the USA, and the March 1 and May 4 Movements in Korea and China respectively challenged Japanese and Western intervention. The Egyptian Revolt against the British would result in swift Egyptian independence - but Britain bitterly held onto the crown of its empire in Asia, slaughtering 379 Sikhs in the Amritsar Massacre in India. In the USA, Prohibition was ratified, enabling the growth of the gangster underground, while a spate of anarchist bombings lead to the Palmer Raids in which 10,000 suspected anarchists and communists were arrested and hundreds including Emma Goldman deported to Russia. The Treaty of Versailles was signed - sowing the seeds not only of the independence of countries like Czechoslovakia, but of what I term the "short World War II" also (my "long World War II" starts with the Japanese invasion of China proper in 1937 and also ends in China with the communist triumph in 1949). The modernist Bauhaus movement was formed, the first non-stop transatlantic flight occurred, the Bavarian Soviet Republic was repressed, the miners of the Ruhr embarked on a massive strike, and South Africa assumed the mandate for formerly German South-West Africa, leading to a conflict that would only be resolved in 1991 with Namibian independence. Now, a century on, and communism seems a dead letter, yet the political polar opposites of anarchism and fascism are reviving to challenge each other once again. The future holds its breath...
[ENDS]
